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Moderate Muslims should not deny Islam terror links

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Why you can trust SCMP
A memorial near the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed in a terrorist attack. Photo: AFP
Siddiq Bazarwala seeks to assure us that we should not worry about Islamically inspired terrorist attacks in the United States because white supremacists kill more people. (“Singling out Muslims as the main terrorist threat is grossly unfair”, February 16).

That is indeed true: if you don’t count the 9/11 attacks (3,000 deaths). And if you don’t count the Orlando killings (49 deaths).

Still, this should not be about body count – after all, more people are killed in bathtub accidents than by terrorism. Also by bee stings or lightning strikes. Random gun deaths dwarf all these put together. Mr Bazarwala’s argument is classic tu quoque, that is: “you/they do it too”. This is a logical fallacy of moral equivalence that distracts from the issue at hand.

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The issue is intent. Bathtubs, bees and lightning intend you no harm. They don’t murder innocents while shouting “Jesus is Lord”. With Islamic terrorism the intent is clear. It is to kill “infidels”.

Killings in the name of Islam are usually accompanied by shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great). The 100 plus jihadist terror groups in the world explicitly root their actions in the doctrines of Islam. This may be uncomfortable to many, who claim terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam” or have “hijacked the religion of peace”. But this is obscurantism. To students of Islam, it is clear that there are parts of its foundational books – the Koran, the Hadith, the biography of Mohammed – which lend themselves to the terrorist horrors we see around the world, including the Sunni-Shia civil war.

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All we seek, we critics of Islamism, is that the troublesome aspects of doctrinal Islam are admitted and contested, by Muslims.

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